`THE FUGITIVE' GETS ITS SECOND WIND

Clifford Terry, Tribune Entertainment WriterCHICAGO TRIBUNE

In "The Fugitive," the smash television series that ran for four years and 120 episodes, David Janssen also ran.

As escapee Dr. Richard Kimble-unjustly sentenced to death for supposedly murdering his wife-he ran to San Francisco, Kansas City, Denver, Beverly Hills and Ft. Wayne. He ran to West Viginia and Michigan, Kentucky and Nebraska, Arizona and Connecticut, Florida and Alaska. He ran to the hills of Missouri and the mountains of Pennsylvania. All in pursuit of the real killer: the notorious one-armed man, prime time's No. 1 nasty.

In the film version, Harrison Ford also runs, but his Richard Kimble slams on the brakes and holes up exclusively in Chicago (now his hometown instead of Stafford, Ind.).

"Conceptually, the idea was that Dr. Kimble would go right back into the cauldron, which would create danger," director Andy Davis is saying on the phone from a Los Angeles dubbing studio, where he is supervising the finishing touches. "We didn't want it to be episodic like the series."

Besides Ford, the $40 million-plus movie (opening Friday) stars Tommy Lee Jones in the Barry Morse-created role as his law-enforcement pursuer, and features Sela Ward as Kimble's late wife, Jeroen Krabbe as his medical colleague and Andreas Katsulas as ol' one-arm.

There have been changes, from the minor (the killer is now named Sykes instead of Fred Johnson and Jones' character is now a deputy U.S. marshal named Sam Gerard instead of an Indiana police lieutenant named Philip Gerard) to the major (there is more than one villain).

"Frankly, I wasn't a big viewer of the program," says Davis. "You know, it was the '60s, and I was into other things besides watching television. But I think my not being an aficionado gave me some freedom that was real valuable because I didn't feel tied to the series. The film has to work on its own as a thriller for people who know nothing about it. And yet the series has many good elements in it, with the `Les Miserables' theme of the unjustly accused man. So if you have a good spine, it's easy to improvise with it."

A native of Chicago-he's the son of local stage actor Nate Davis-Davis graduated in journalism from University of Illinois, then worked as a cinematographer and as a director of such films as "Code of Silence" (which starred Chuck Norris), "The Package" (with Gene Hackman) and "Above the Law" and "Under Siege" (both with Steven Seagal).

"When I came on the project last fall, my immediate tendency was to say, `OK, we'll go to Chicago,' even though I figured Warner Bros. would say, `Oh, my God, it's going to be winter and you always shoot there.' We didn't have a lot of time to prepare. Knowing the city as well as we do, it made it a lot easier to find locations quickly. You know, if I had gone to Baltimore or somewhere, I would have had to spend months looking around the whole place to figure out if I had made the right decision."

"In all our earlier drafts we had Kimble moving around the country, even going down to Mexico, but it didn't work," says producer Arnold Kopelson. "In a movie, you have to establish the rooting interest for the protagonist very early. It's very difficult to do that when you're hopping to seven or eight locations."

No question the Emmy-winning "Fugitive" was one of television's keepers. When the final installment aired on Aug. 29, 1967, it set a viewership record for a regular series. (It was broken by "Dallas" (1980) and "M+A+S+H" (1983)). In 1990 "The Fugitive" was revived on the Arts and Entertainment cable network.

"We really weren't trying to remake the original," says co-writer Jeb Stuart ("Die Hard"). "Which is why we played around with the villains. I like movies where you feel there's a very simple story line, then when you get to that point, it twists away. We also decided to put in some humor. The story is so intense, you have to find a little ledge and let out your breath.

"I do know there's a core audience. At a cocktail party, someone asked me what I was working on, and when I told them, two guys in their 40s broke into the series' preamble. They also told me their mothers loved Janssen's Richard Kimble because he was faithful to his wife. He had all these opportunities, but he never went to bed with a woman. That just endeared him to women everywhere."

"We felt we would get the over-40 crowd, so we concentrated on making this a new movie for everybody who had no history with this project," says Kopelson. "In our test-marketing screenings, we've been getting the highest scores in the history of Warner Bros., and most of the people were under 25."

"The film is just a little richer in the sense that you get to know Richard Kimble a little more," adds Davis. "You see him fall from grace, see a little more of his lifestyle before he's in trouble. In our version, he's a very successful, somewhat irreverent, arrogant surgeon who turns out to be a muckraker, a whistleblower. So there's a certain kind of integrity he has as a human being.

"We also needed a dynamic balance between Kimble and Gerard. If we had had a flat Gerard, it would have been boring. With Tommy in his role, he's a lot more fun than the television Gerard, that's for sure. The way the marshal works off his assistants gives the film some humor. Harrison is fairly isolated, so we needed that balance.

"Interestingly, Harrison and I were in a Chicago restaurant, and a little child walked by who turned out to be the daughter of a doctor from Northwestern Memorial Hospital whom one of my assistants knew. Harrison glommed onto this doctor because he had a beard and long hair like Kimble, and we went back to his house that night with his wife and family, and they had this great art collection. We modeled Kimble's house on his house."

In the series, women-steadfastly believing in Kimble's innocence-were always throwing themselves at him, which doesn't happen in the film.

"There was a lot of discussion about that," says Davis, "but it didn't seem to be appropriate. What we decided to go for was the warmth of the relationship he had with his wife. And the pace of the movie was such that there wasn't time for him to fall in love with anybody. He was so driven to prove his innocence."

The crew spent 2 1/2 weeks in North Carolina, where they filmed the bus and train wreck that allows Kimble to escape on his way to prison, and a subsequent sequence in which he dives from a huge dam. Shooting in Chicago started in early February and wound up in mid-May.

The motion picture adaptation was literally years in the making. The producer, a big fan of the series, first became involved in the '70s, then took it up again five years ago, eventually going through eight writers and 14 drafts. About two years ago, Alec Baldwin was slated to star and Walter Hill ("48HRS.") was to direct. "With an expensive movie, the consideration is, what star can `open' it, and the studio wasn't certain at that time that Alec could do it," says Kopelson.

"We were on a crazy schedule because Warners wanted Aug. 6 as the release date. Consequently, we had, like, seven editors and 21 assistants working almost around the clock when we were shooting. It was a rather harrowing experience."

There was one unexpected problem when actor Richard Jordan, who played Kimble's doctor friend, got sick and had to be replaced with Krabbe. Other than that, the biggest challege, says Kopelson, was the wreck of the bus and train that allows Kimble to escape. ("I mean, you only get one shot.")

Still, next to "Platoon," which he also produced, "The Fugitive" was a piece of cake.

" `Platoon' was made for $5.9 million. We shot it in the Philippines. We had great problems filming there because of the change of government after the coup against Marcos. We had to make all new deals. We didn't know whether we were going to get our equipment. There was intense heat. I'm talking 120 in the shade at 8 in the morning. And there were bugs and snakes and all of the things that no one thinks would ever happen when you're making a movie. Contrast that with Chicago. Where the main thing that happened is that I froze my ass off."